It’s as if Bob Monkhouse were standing in front of us. In fact, Simon Cartwright even prompts a few gasps from the audience as the lights go up on his arched dark eyebrows and oddly orange face, as he resurrects the comedian and game-show host who died, aged 74, in 2003.
And as he fires out Monkhouse’s profusion of one-liners, acting as if we were a television studio audience, Cartwright nails his subject’s clear, almost courtly middle-class tones; each phrase is a set-up and punchline in itself, as the voice rises for emphasis then falls for reassurement. Masterly.
Still, these acts of comical necromancy can be skilful yet second-hand affairs. This one, though, written by Alex Lowe and directed by Bob Golding, is too vivid and too thoughtful to deny.
No, Golding can’t wring laughter and tears from Monkhouse quite like he managed as an actor when he played Eric Morecambe in this same room in 2010. You can sense Lowe neatly ordering his material so that Monkhouse gets in a lot about the early part of his career with his co-writer, Denis Goodwin, as he stands in his office at home practising the speech he’ll give at a 20-year memorial service for Goodwin. And, for all that Monkhouse had his frailties — we see Cartwright being upset by a mock-up Family Fortunes scoreboard that shows the public associating him with smugness, insincerity and infidelity — the comic was unusually resilient rather than unusually melancholic.
Cartwright talks on the phone to a policeman trying to help him track down his missing joke books. He reminisces about his prolific philandering: did he want the approval of so many women because his own mother was so disapproving? He supposes so, while knowing a cop-out when he hears one. Monkhouse was nothing if not a smooth operator and if the show can’t dig fathoms deep it’s because neither could — or would — the man himself.
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Still, it ends on a surprisingly emotional note, as this Monkhouse talks about his son, Gary, who had cerebral palsy. And Cartwright sells the sincerity here, just as he sells the self-knowing oiliness and glib wit elsewhere. He makes the case that it was Monkhouse’s belated willingness to appear vulnerable that makes us feel more warmly towards him at the end of his career. It’s an uncanny hour, but also an amusing and intelligent one.
Box office: 0131 623 3030, to Aug 31, then touring to Oct 17 (cahootstheatrecompany.com)